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Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 151

bear on his reading of Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts, which he charges with a

twofold process of mystification:^24 Hegel both reverses subject and predicate

by assuming the agency of the Idea and arbitrarily embodies abstract logical

categories in specific persons or groups.^25 The most important of these persons

is the monarch—whom, as Marx contends, “Hegel is concerned to present...

as the real ‘God-man,’ as the real embodiment of the Idea.”^26 However, Marx

sees the same dynamic at work in the status Hegel assigns to the estates, the

landed gentry, and the bureaucracy. Hegel invests each of these groups with a

universality it does not, Marx argues at length, truly embody.

Even as he leaned on Feuerbach to critique Hegel, Marx became preoccu-

pied in 1843 and early 1844 with how to rethink Feuerbach’s anthropological

conception of human intersubjective ontology (species-being) in more specif-

ically social terms.^27 We can chart the trajectory of Marx’s social inflection of

species-being by the changing protagonists he privileges as figures of social

agency, from das Volk of the unpublished 1843 Kreuznach Kritik and the letters

to Ruge published in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher to the “real Jews” of

“Zur Judenfrage” and then to the proletariat of the “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen

Rechtsphilosophie, Einleitung.” These texts are intricately related. The second

of Marx’s letters to Ruge published in the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher

dates from May 1843 , some two months after he began work on his Kreuznach

manuscript on Hegel. He turned to “Zur Judenfrage” immediately after com-

pleting the Kreuznach Kritik in late summer 1843 ; and the next essay he wrote

was the “Einleitung,” which was intended to serve as an introduction to a longer

work on Hegel’s political philosophy (a reworking of the Kreuznach Kritik).

Marx’s thought was evolving so rapidly in this period, however, that by the time

he wrote the “Einleitung” it was no longer compatible with much of the analysis

in the Kritik (one reason, presumably, that Marx never produced the planned

work that the “Einleitung” was to introduce). Any understanding of the role that

the Jews of “Zur Judenfrage” play in the evolution of Marx’s thought must take

into account this broader context of the protagonists that successively advanced

Marx’s attempts to rethink species-being in social terms. The Volk, the Jews, and

the proletariat each embody a different theorization of society and of the inter-

relationships between consciousness and social materiality as these pertain to

revolutionary agency or praxis.

In his 1842 journalism as well as the May 1843 letter to Ruge, Marx repeatedly

critiques a brute order. This line of Marx’s early thought opposes human ideal-

ism (a term he frequently uses affirmatively) with animal materialism. Marx’s

strategy in this idealist period is not to try to ground abstraction in real, empiri-

cal conditions but to insist that human rationality and freedom must permeate